New Books in African American Studies

“What is Africa to me?”, African-American writer Countee Cullen asked in Color, his 1925 collection of poems. African Americans and Africa: A New History (Yale University Press, 2019) lays out the long history of African American engagement with the continent. Nemata Blyden’s sweeping narrative weaves together iterations of Cullen’s question that have kept re-emerging from the 1600s through the 2010s, and various answers that Black people in the United States have come up with. Early on, enslaved Africans preserved and transmitted aspects of their culture.In the 19th century, some Black Americans chose to settle on the continent as missionaries, often readily adopting a civilizational discourse that mirrored Western portrayals of Africa as backwards. Others, including members of the Negro Convention movements, fiercely rejected the idea of emigration. Arguments on either ends of this spectrum, as Blyden shows, were both steeped in quests to achieve freedom and justice. In the 1920s and beyond, Pan-Africanism blossomed, followed decades later by the Civil Rights and decolonization movements. Black Americans and Africans alike, people such as Eslanda Goode Robeson or Asadata Dafora, circulated across the Atlantic, crafting and spreading their own ideas about the continent’s place in Black liberation. In this episode, Blyden also gives us a fascinating glimpse of her own family’s history, connecting the West Indies, West Africa, and North America in the 19th and 20th centuries.Madina Thiam is a PhD candidate in African History at UCLA. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies

A stark disparity exists between black and white youth experiences in the justice system today. Black youths are perceived to be older and less innocent than their white peers. When it comes to incarceration, race trumps class, and even as black youths articulate their own experiences with carceral authorities, many Americans remain surprised by the inequalities they continue to endure. In Presumed Criminal: Black Youth and the Justice System in Postwar New York (NYU Press, 2019), Carl Suddler brings to light a much longer history of the policies and strategies that tethered the lives of black youths to the justice system indefinitely.The criminalization of black youth is inseparable from its racialized origins. In the mid-twentieth century, the United States justice system began to focus on punishment, rather than rehabilitation. By the time the federal government began to address the issue of juvenile delinquency, the juvenile justice system shifted its priorities from saving delinquent youth to purely controlling crime, and black teens bore the brunt of the transition.In New York City, increased state surveillance of predominantly black communities compounded arrest rates during the post–World War II period, providing justification for tough-on-crime policies. Questionable police practices, like stop-and-frisk, combined with media sensationalism, cemented the belief that black youth were the primary cause for concern. Even before the War on Crime, the stakes were clear: race would continue to be the crucial determinant in American notions of crime and delinquency, and black youths condemned with a stigma of criminality would continue to confront the overwhelming power of the state.Adam McNeil is a PhD Student in History at Rutgers University-New Brunswick. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies

Kathryn H. Ross has found a balance. Between past and present. Between self and ancestors. Between self-discovery and continuous growth. In her hybrid collection, Black Was Not a Label, Ross invites readers into a life unfurling. Through the lenses of natural hair, faith, and microaggressions, she lights a path to what it means to seek self while still honoring the past lives, personal and historical, that connect us all.Black Was Not a Label (Pronto, 2019) is as soft as it is sharp. Ross is a writer of humanness, one who finds more interest in what we feel than theme. Yet, even in this general warmth, she manages to hone in on topics that have rippled throughout generations. Readers are not allowed to look away from the sometimes ingrained expectations of assimilation nor are we allowed to put down the weight of all that came before us. What she gives us in this collection are the means to carry it with grace and the hope it will become a little lighter.Kathryn Ross is a Southern California based writer and editor. Her works of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry have previously appeared in Sybil Literary Journal, MORIA Literary Magazine, Linden Avenue, and Crack the Spine. She is a columnist at Pasadena Now where she writes about race and culture and a poetry and essay reviewer for Whale Road Review and The Rumpus, respectively. She completed her MA in English and Creative Writing at Azusa Pacific University and loves cats, baths, and rose slushies.Athena Dixon is a NE Ohio native, poet, essayist, and editor. Her essay collection, The Incredible Shrinking Woman, is forthcoming from Split/Lip Press (2020). Athena is also the author of No God in This Room, a poetry chapbook (Argus House Press). Her poetry is included in The BreakBeat Poets Vol. 2: Black Girl Magic (Haymarket Books). Learn more at www.athenadixon.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies

As we now know, epidemics and pandemics are not new phenomena. In her new book The Yellow Demon of Fever: Fighting Disease in the 19th-Century Transatlantic Slave Trade (Yale University Press, 2020), Manuel Barcia offers a striking rendition of the diseases that swept through the illegal slave trade Atlantic World. In fact, Barcia argues that the history of disease and the story of continuing traffic in enslaved people despite the abolition of the slave trade are processes that must be understood together. Barcia demonstrates that in the 19th century Atlantic, quarantines were politicized, sworn enemies were forced to work together to combat disease, and the medical expertise of enslaved people often prevailed despite efforts to silence or ignore it. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies

John Hervey Wheeler (1908–1978) was one of the civil rights movement's most influential leaders. In articulating a bold vision of regional prosperity grounded in full citizenship and economic power for African Americans, this banker, lawyer, and visionary would play a key role in the fight for racial and economic equality throughout North Carolina.Utilizing previously unexamined sources from the John Hervey Wheeler Collection at the Atlanta University Center Robert W. Woodruff Library, Brandon K. Winford's John Hervey Wheeler, Black Banking, and the Economic Struggle for Civil Rights (University Press of Kentucky, 2019) explores the black freedom struggle through the life of North Carolina's most influential black power broker. After graduating from Morehouse College, Wheeler returned to Durham and began a decades-long career at Mechanics and Farmers (M&F) Bank. He started as a teller and rose to become bank president in 1952. In 1961, President Kennedy appointed Wheeler to the President's Committee on Equal Employment Opportunity, a position in which he championed equal rights for African Americans and worked with Vice President Johnson to draft civil rights legislation. One of the first blacks to attain a high position in the state's Democratic Party, Wheeler became the state party's treasurer in 1968, and then its financial director.Wheeler urged North Carolina's white financial advisors to steer the region toward the end of Jim Crow segregation for economic reasons. Straddling the line between confrontation and negotiation, Wheeler pushed for increased economic opportunity for African Americans while reminding the white South that its future was linked to the plight of black southerners.Today I talked to Brandon K. WinfordDr. Brandon K. Winford is an assistant professor of history at the University of Tennessee. He is a historian of the late-nineteenth and twentieth-century United States and African American history with areas of specialization in civil rights and black business history.Adam McNeil is a PhD Student in colonial and revolutionary-era Black women’s history. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies

In Troubling Freedom: Antigua and the Aftermath of British Emancipation (Duke University Press, 2015), Natasha J. Lightfoot traces the ways Antiguans and Barbudans experienced freedom in the immediate years before and decades after British emancipation in 1834. With the exception of a handful of places, slavery ended immediately without a period of apprenticeship. However, Lightfoot deftly shows how immediate emancipation did not translate into complete freedom as Antiguan elites enacted new forms control to restrict the time, mobility, wages, and housing availability of freedpeople. They also continued to experience violence in their everyday lives. Despite these constraints, emancipated Antiguans and Barbudans managed to earn livelihoods, obtain land, secure housing, and build independent communities in accordance to and opposition against elites’ attitudes about them. Lightfoot’s study asks us to reconsider how freedom was lived in everyday life and how landlessness was not the primary obstacle for emancipated slaves in the Caribbean.Sharika Crawford is an associate professor of history at the United States Naval Academy.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies

How do young men use drill music and social media to gain power? In his new book, Ballad of the Bullet: Gangs, Drill Music, and the Power of Online Infamy (Princeton University Press, 2020), Forrest Stuart uses ethnographic and interview methods to explore the lived experiences of young men on Chicago’s south side. Stuart peels back the layers on what is commonly referred to as the digital divide, or the idea that there is unequal access to and use of technology, to instead find what he refers to as digital disadvantage (read the book to find out more!). The book tackles issues including who the audience really is for drill music and the social media output produced by these young men, and how they are sometimes exploited in the process. Exploration of authenticity, micro-celebrity, and self-branding contribute to larger understandings of race, stratification, and power in America.Sarah E. Patterson is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Michigan. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies

Kenesha N. Grant, Assistant Professor of Political Science at Howard University, at the beginning of her new book, The Great Migration and the Democratic Party: Black Voters and the Realignment of American Politics in the 20th Century (Temple University Press, 2020), poses a question to consider in context of trying to understand the realignment of voters within American political parties. This question is about the impact of the Great Migration of African Americans from the South to northern cities, and how this changed the political dynamics in many of the places where African Americans settled and built new lives. Grant’s examination focuses specifically on the impact in terms of politics, how and where African American individuals engaged in politics, as voters, and in running for and being elected to office. The Great Migration and the Democratic Party concentrates on three cities where the population changed and shifted given the influx of black citizens; and the political dynamics in Detroit, Chicago, and in New York City all came to reflect, in different ways, the influx of new voters and politically active citizens. The Great Migration and the Democratic Party focuses on the local, state, and national Democratic Party, since these voters were not only politically engaged at the local level, they were also able to contribute to voting blocs within states, at times making the difference in terms of the Electoral College and presidential candidacies.The Great Migration and the Democratic Party traces the changes in the political parties over the course of the 20th century, exploring the shifts of voters across parties, with specific attention to Black voters’ movement from the Republican Party to the Democratic Party. Grant examines this shift in context of the movement of voters from one part of the United States to other parts of the United States, but also through the lens of how white Democratic elected officials in northern cities approached and engaged Black voters, and how both black and white citizens in these large urban centers participated in politics. Ultimately, Grant positions the Great Migration as a key dimension of some of the shifts and changes that have occurred in the parties over the past century. In tracing the political impact of the great migration, Grant also concludes her work with some analysis of the re-migration of African Americans back to the South, and how active citizens and voters may once again change the dynamics in American politics.Lilly J. Goren is professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012), as well as co-editor of Mad Men and Politics: Nostalgia and the Remaking of Modern America (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies

Anne Heffernan's new book Limpopo’s Legacy, Student Politics and Democracy in South Africa (James Currey, 2019) is a thoroughly researched account of the Black Consciousness Movement, student activism, and politics in South Africa from the 1960s to the present. Heffernan focuses specifically on black student activism at the University of the North at Turfloop, a rural university in the Northern Transvaal, the modern-day Limpopo province. She compellingly argues that rural uprisings shaped politics nationally as contestations between university students, administrators, and apartheid officials escalated. Heffernan importantly demonstrates that these confrontations and the bureaucratic responses to them assisted the diffusion of radical politics nation-wide, especially in the years leading up to the Soweto Uprisings of 1976.Heffernan’s biographical sketches of William Kgware, Abram Tiro, Julius Malema, Peter Mokaba, and others outline the political legacies and imprints that residents, students, and activists from Limpopo had and continue to have on post-apartheid politics. In extending her investigation to include student and youth politics after Soweto, Heffernan explores how politics in the Northern Transvaal remained central to national contestations between Black Consciousness and ANC-aligned youth groups throughout the 1980s. Heffernan’s unwavering focus on Limpopo reframes our understanding of national politics and student activists’ central role in shaping them. Limpopo’s Legacy is a foundational text that provides the historical context for understanding contemporary student movements and electoral politics in South Africa today.Amanda Joyce Hall is a Ph.D. Candidate in History and African American Studies at Yale University. She is writing an international history on the global movement against South African apartheid during the 1970s and 1980s. She tweets from @amandajoycehall Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies

Technology has been instrumental in allowing audiences to encounter expressions of culture to which they may have no direct connection. The popular commercial platforms like Twitter and Instagram mediate culture, the affordances of each determining how aspects of culture translate on the sites. In his new book, Distributed Blackness: African American Cybercultures (NYU Press, 2020), Andre Brock, an associate professor at Georgia Tech, theorizes what it means to be Black online, particularly when the physical body can neither be understood nor constrained. Though considering topics like afro-pessimism and the digital divide, Brock particularly focuses on Black joy – “the embodied cognition where Black people express their relationship to the world through our joy in moving through it.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies